With Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday kicking off the holiday shopping season, nonprofits around the world unite to mark the beginning of the charitable season. This global movement dubbed #GivingTuesday encourages individuals to donate their time, money, and talent to their favorite causes.

While charitable giving did uptick to $390 billion in 2016 (a 2.7% increase from the previous year), nonprofits still struggle to maintain fundraising engagement and drive volunteer participation to their organizations.

Similar to their for-profit counterparts, nonprofit teams thrive when they tell compelling stories to their audiences.Network for Good reports that 55% of nonprofits experienced a positive impact in fundraising because of great storytelling.

Nonprofits like Watsi and DoSomething are taking storytelling to the next level. Through personalized messaging, these organizations boost audience involvement — and we’re proud to help make that happen in Customer.io. Let’s take a look at their journeys…

Most users go off the rails from our best-laid plans. And if your lifecycle communication falls off a cliff into silence after signup or fails to strike a chord, the result is indefinite derailment, abandonment and churn.

So we try to get users to do what we want them to do, telling them to “do this” and “click that” and “let us know if you need help with the thing you don’t know or care about yet” — and that’s the problem. Our message is wholly based on what we want and assume. This is the crude railroading approach, as we explain in our post on lifecycle campaign lessons from Dungeons & Dragons. “Railroading”, in D&D, refers to the frowned-upon practice of trying to force players into a pre-written plot, when the fun of the game is in collectively creating the story. Many ineffective lifecycle emails take this approach, coming off as annoying and tonedeaf, because they’re not taking real account of the recipient’s needs.